Marking and annotating electronic documents

ABSTRACT

A user can highlight text and provide accompanying annotations. Highlighted text, accompanying annotations, and time-stamp information are stored in a user profile that is maintained locally with a web browser, at the client side. A retrieved web page is presented to a user with annotations of some form, based upon the user profile. The retrieved web page may typically be annotated through marked or highlighted portions of text, so that the user can readily locate this information in the web page, and assess the relevance of the retrieved page.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates to marking and annotating electronicdocuments, such as Web pages, based on a user's highlighted preferenceshistory.

BACKGROUND

Web personalization involves tailoring Web content directly to aspecific user. This can be accomplished by having the user provideinformation to the Web site directly, or through tracking of the user'sbehavior on the site. The software on the Web site then can modify thecontent to suit the particular user's needs. That is, all thepersonalization is done at the Web site.

Typically, a Web site maintains profiles of the users that visits thesite, and analyzes the information gathered. Based on this analysis,information of interest to each user is delivered.

Explicit or implicit profiling techniques can be used to collect userinformation, either alone or in combination. Explicit profiling involvesasking each user to complete a questionnaire or similar, while implicitprofiling involves tracking the behavior of each user, and drawinginferences from such observed behavior.

One form of implicit profiling involves the use of “cookies” that arestored at the browser and updated at each visit, and record browsingpatterns.

To present appropriate content to the user and make properrecommendation, rule-based techniques or filtering techniques can beused. Filtering techniques may involve simple filtering, content-basedfiltering and collaborative filtering. Collaborative-filtering softwarecompares the information gained about one user's behavior against dataabout other users with similar interests.

None of the techniques described above are entirely satisfactory.Consequently, techniques are sought that have application in navigatingelectronic content.

SUMMARY

A user's interest in a recently viewed web page can be determinedautomatically from that user's highlighted text and annotation historyprofiled from the previously viewed web pages. Such annotationstypically constitute marked or highlighted portions of text,accompanying comments, or other forms of annotation. This annotationinformation is maintained in a user profile at the client side. Aretrieved web page is presented to a user with annotations of some form,based upon the viewer's user profile. The retrieved web page maytypically be annotated through marked or highlighted portions of text,so that the user can readily locate this information in the web page,and assess the relevance of the retrieved page.

A context for the highlighted information is obtained by annotating thetext, and can be presented to the user along with the text. A web pagepresented to the user is marked to indicate the information of interest.When a user rolls the mouse over this text, the annotation is shown atthe mouse position. This is the context that applies to the text, whichindicates to the user the broad topic to which the marked text relates.Ontology can be represented in any form, and can be stored as adatabase, and represents relationships between words. A word-net can beused to enhance this gathered information. Information concerning theuser's interest can be presented to the user without the need forserver-side processing.

Highlighted text, accompanying comments, and time-stamp information arestored in a user profile that is maintained locally with the browser, atthe client side. The user profile is updated as the user visits newpages and annotates these web pages. When a user accesses a new webpage, text in this page that is, for example, similar to the text storedin the user profile, is automatically marked. Other annotations can alsobe assigned. Since the marking occurs at the client side, profiles canbe shared and used across different sites the user visits.

DESCRIPTION OF DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 is a schematic representation of a system architecture forannotating electronic documents.

FIG. 2 is a schematic representation of components of apreference-enable text marker.

FIG. 3 is a schematic representation of a computer interface having adialog box for prompting a user to annotate text.

FIG. 4 is Javascript code that can be added to a Web page to faciliateannotation of the highlighted text on the Web page.

FIG. 5 is a schematic representation of a computer interface indicatinginformation of interest to a user.

FIG. 6 is a schematic representation of a computer system suitable foroperating the described computer interfaces.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

FIG. 1 schematically represents an architecture of the described system.A Web Browser 100 is enabled to create and update a User Profile 130based on highlighted and annotated text of previous web pages. The WebBrowser 100 then marks the text in the retrieved Web Page 150 based onthe User Profile 130. The marked Web Page 150 is presented to the userby the Web Browser 100.

The system architecture of FIG. 1 has five components that supplementthe Web Browser 100, namely, User Manager 110, Event Listener and TextExtractor 112, Annotator 114, Profile Manager 116 and Preference EnabledText Marker 118 that supplement the functionality of a conventional webbrowser. Each of these components is described in turn below. FIG. 2schematically represents components of the Preference Enabled TextMarker 118, described in further detail below.

User Manager: The main function of the User Manager 110 is to identifythe “userid” of the “logged on” user. The User Manager 110 also createsa User Profile 130, if a User Profile 130 does not already exist. Eachuser has their own User Profile 130 that stores their preferences. TheUser Manager 110 maintains the privacy of each user. The security andprivacy of the User Profile 130 can be maintained using the file systemuser privileges provided by the operating system. If the operatingsystem does not provide a way to identify the user, then the system canmaintain a single User Profile 130 that is common to all the users ofthat particular instance of the Web Browser 100.

Event Listener and Text Extractor: The Event Listener and Text Extractor112 listens to the “mouse-dragged” event. This operating system eventgets fired whenever a user highlights particular text in a web page.When the event is fired the Event Listener and Text Extractor 112extracts the highlighted text from the web page and sends the textstring to the Annotator 114, which is described directly below.

Annotator: The Annotator 114 enables the user to annotate the user'shighlighted text. This allows the user to associate the context with thehighlighted text. When the user annotates a text, the user's annotatingcomments may either summarize the text or disambiguate the text. This iswhat meant by giving a context to the text of interest to the user. Forexample, a particular text about networking might be of interest to oneuser because the text is about wireless networking, for another user thetext may be interesting since the text is about security. So when theuser annotates the text with words “network security”, this is thecontext in which the user looking for further information. Therefore, aparticular text might be relevant within different contexts, i.e., thetext can have different meanings depending upon how the text is used.Thus, annotation helps the system to distinguish between differentpossible meanings of the text. The second use of annotation is tosummarize a text. For example, the user visits page “A” and highlightsthe text “optimized to manage large collections of smaller objects suchas statements and reports and checks” appearing on page “A”. The systemdoes not in his case receive any information concerning what theinformation is about. Annotator 114, however, allow the user to markthis information with the annotation of “content manager”. Now thesystem can make use of the annotation to find the information of theuser interest in the pages that talk about “content manager”. Once thehighlighted text is annotated, if any, then the Annotator 114 passes thehighlighted text along with accompanying annotation to the ProfileManager 116.

Profile Manager: Profile Manager 116 receives the annotated highlightedtext from the Annotator 114. Profile Manager 116 obtains the file systemlocation of the User Profile 130 from the User Manager 110. ProfileManager 116 then stores this highlighted text along with the associatedannotation in the User Profile 130. Table 1 below presents the format ofthe User Profile 130. TABLE 1 Format of User Profile 130 Timestamp ofTimestamp of Highlighted Text \Annotation highlighting Expiry................... ................... ...................................... ................... ...................................... ................... ...................

As shown in Table 1 above, the User Profile 130 stores the time when theuser highlighted and annotated the relevant text. The fourth rowindicates the “life” of each entry in the User Profile 130 (that is,each highlighted text and its annotation). An “Expiry date” can be usedto avoid maintaining the history beyond certain time.

The user can set a system parameter that controls how much past historyis considered when marking a Web Page 150. The Profile Manager 116 usesthis parameter to compute the Timestamp of Expiry for the User Profile130 entry. Suppose the user sets the parameters to indicate that theuser is interested in keeping the history for 30 days. If an entry ismade in the user profile, for page A on 1^(st) Jan 12 p.m. 30 days timeis added to the time when the entry is inserted. This is the time ofexpiry. Time of expiry is 31^(st) Jan 12.00 pm. Now, on 10^(th) Jan theuser again changes the parameter to contain 20 days of history. The timeof expiry for page A is updated by adding 20 days to timestamp ofhighlighting. Alternatively, after highlighting and annotating the usercan be prompted to provide the time duration for which the informationis to persist in the User Profile 130. The expiry time for theinformation is then calculated and stored in the User Profile 130 alongwith the other information. Profile Manager 116 runs a maintenancealgorithm that removes entries in the User Profile 130 that are expired.

Preference-Enabled Text Marker: The Preference Enabled Text Marker 118receives web pages from the HTTP client 119 in the Web Browser 100,which in turn retrieves web pages from the Web Server 120. ThePreference Enabled Text Marker 118 presents web pages to the user insuch a way that the information is highlighted and annotatedautomatically. This highlighting and annotation is based upon the UserProfile 130, which contains the history of the highlighted text andannotations from the previously browsed pages. FIG. 2 schematicallyrepresents different components of the Preference Enabled Text Marker118.

Various steps performed by the Preference Enabled Text Marker 118 arenow described with reference to the components of the Preference EnabledText Marker 118 depicted in FIG. 2. Let LA be a list of all annotations(List of Annotations) in the User Profile 130, let T_(i) be the list ofall highlighted text available in the user profile for annotation α_(i),and let S_(i) be the list of synonyms of annotation α_(i). Table 2 belowpresents an algorithm performed by the Preference Enabled Text Marker118. TABLE 2 1. A page W retrieved by the HTTP client 119 from the WebServer 120 is provided to the Profiler 216. 2. The Profiler 216 thenreads the User Profile 130 of that user and retrieves LA 3. For eachannotation a_(i) in the list LA a. Profiler 216 retrieves a list of allthe corresponding highlighted text entries T_(i). b. Profiler 216queries an Ontology Plug-in 140 to get S_(i). c. Profiler 216 passesS_(i), T_(i), a_(i) and W to the Match Finder 212. d. Match Finder 212passes T_(i) and W to Pattern Locator 210. e. Pattern Locator 210 findsthe position of each text element of T_(i) in W, and returns back a listdenoted by P_(i) of position pairs <b_(i), e_(i)> providing beginningand ending positions of the sentence in the retrieved web page in whichthe strings were approximately matched. f. Match Finder 212 stores thislist P_(i) and then passes S_(i), a_(i) and W to the Pattern Locator210. g. Pattern Locator 210 performs exact string matching for each ofthe string in S_(i) and a_(i) in W. Pattern Locator 210 returns back alist denoted P_(j) of position pairs <b_(i), e_(i)> of the beginning andending positions of the sentence in the retrieved web page in which thestrings were exactly matched. h. Match Finder 212 now merges P_(i) andP_(j) and removes duplicates, if there are any. For each entry <b_(i),e_(i)> in this merged list, Match Finder 212 augments the annotationa_(i) and stores the resulting triplet <b_(i), e_(i), a_(i)> in patternlist LP. i. Match Finder 212 sends a signal to Profiler 216 that MatchFinder 212 has updated the pattern list for annotation a_(i). 4.Profiler 216 sends a signal to Match Finder 212 that all the annotationshave been processed and sends it W and LA. 5. Match Finder 212 thensends W, LA and pattern list LP to the Page Composer 214. 6. PageComposer 214 performs the following steps a. For each a_(i) in LA. PageComposer 214 assigns a unique combination of foreground and backgroundcolors. b. For each triplet <b_(i), e_(i), a_(i)> in LP, the PageComposer 214 obtains the starting position b_(i) and ending positione_(i) of the sentence in the Web page and then inserts Hypertext MarkupLanguage (HTML) tags at the starting and ending position so that thetext of the sentence appears in bold with the foreground and backgroundcolors corresponding to a_(i). This operation performs the marking forthe text matching with the user's preferences. Also Page Composer 214inserts a special tag so that the annotation a_(i) is shown as a “tip”when user rolls the mouse over the sentence text. 7. The Page Composer214 then presents this modified page to the user.

The Pattern Locator 210 used by the Preference Enabled Text Marker 118uses a module to perform approximate string matching in step 3e of Table2, using any suitable approximate string matching algorithm. A suitablealgorithm is described in Cole, R., Hariharan, R., “Approximate StringMatching: A simpler faster algorithm”, SIAM Journal on Computing, Volume31, Number 6, pages 1761-1782, 2002, the content of which is herebyincorporated by reference.

FIG. 3 schematically represents a typical user experience while usingthe system. A user interface window 310 displays text 340. When a userhighlights a portion of text 350, Event Listener and Text Extractor 112is activated and extracts the highlighted text, which is passed to theAnnotator 114. Annotator 114 then prompts the user to provide anaccompanying comment 330 for the highlighted text 350 using a dialog box320.

Web Browser Implementations

A web browser having the functionality described herein can beconstructed by adding appropriate components to a conventional browser.The browser needs to read the User Profile 130, which is created by theuser. The user appropriately creates the User Profile 130 in the right(system) directory structure with the right schema so that the browsercan read the User Profile 130, and take appropriate action in markingand annotating documents automatically.

Alternatively, an implementation can be achieved without addingcomponents to a Web browser, but by achieving equivalent functionalityusing code embedded in the actual Web pages. FIG. 4 presents Javascriptcode, which is interpreted by compatible browsers, and which can be usedfor this purpose.

The web page is downloaded, and the User Manager 110 is invoked toidentify the user and the appropriate user profile location. Javascriptcode can be added to the web page to provide the simulation for theEvent Listener and Text Extractor 112, Annotator 114 and Profile Manager116. The “Preference Enabled Text Marker” algorithm described above isthen applied to the page, and the page is presented to the user througha web browser.

A maintenance algorithm, which removes entries in the User Profile 130,is activated by the Profile Manager 116 and runs as a daemon in thebackground. To understand the working of the simulator, assume that theuser “xyz” starts using the simulated system for the first time. TheUser Manager 110 identifies the user and creates the User Profile 130.Initially, the User Profile 130 is empty. If the user wants to browsethe page www.abc.com the browser downloads the relevant page. TheJavascript code of FIG. 4 is added to the downloaded page, either byincluding appropriate Javascript to the downloaded webpage, or by usinga suitable browser plugin for the browser.

Since the user is using the system for the first time, the code for the“Preference Enabled Text Marker” presents the page to the user withoutalteration. When the user highlights and annotates information in thispresented page, these annotations are stored in the User Profile 130.When the user sends a request to the simulator to browse another page,the same steps as mentioned above are carried out for this requestedpage. When the page is passed to Preference Enabled Text Marker 118,this page is passed to its various components and the simulator presentsthe final composed page to the user.

Annotations to Browsed Documents

FIG. 5 represents a page in which annotations are made based upon a userprofile. In this example, when the user brings the mouse on top of thefirst line of text, a entry “Data Warehouse” is displayed as thehighlighted line is annotated by “Data Warehouse” in FIG. 3, as recordedin the User Profile 130. In FIG. 3, the user annotates this same text,which is associated with this annotation in the User Profile 130. When anew page is fetched, the User Profile 130 is automatically applied onthe fetched page and the text is automatically highlighted andannotated.

Computer Hardware

FIG. 6 is a schematic representation of a computer system 600 of a typethat is suitable for executing computer software for annotatingelectronic documents in the manner described herein. Computer softwareexecutes under a suitable operating system installed on the computersystem 600, and may be thought of as comprising various software codemeans for achieving particular steps.

The components of the computer system 600 include a computer 620, akeyboard 610 and mouse 615, and a video display 690. The computer 620includes a processor 640, a memory 650, input/output (I/O) interfaces660, 665, a video interface 645, and a storage device 655.

The processor 640 is a central processing unit (CPU) that executes theoperating system and the computer software executing under the operatingsystem. The memory 650 includes random access memory (RAM) and read-onlymemory (ROM), and is used under direction of the processor 640.

The video interface 645 is connected to video display 690 and providesvideo signals for display on the video display 690. User input tooperate the computer 620 is provided from the keyboard 610 and mouse615. The storage device 655 can include a disk drive or any othersuitable storage medium.

Each of the components of the computer 620 is connected to an internalbus 630 that includes data, address, and control buses, to allowcomponents of the computer 620 to communicate with each other via thebus 630.

The computer system 600 can be connected to one or more other similarcomputers via a input/output (I/O) interface 665 using a communicationchannel 685 to a network, represented as the Internet 680.

The computer software may be recorded on a portable storage medium, inwhich case, the computer software program is accessed by the computersystem 600 from the storage device 655. Alternatively, the computersoftware can be accessed directly from the Internet 680 by the computer620. In either case, a user can interact with the computer system 600using the keyboard 610 and mouse 615 to operate the programmed computersoftware executing on the computer 620.

Other configurations or types of computer systems can be equally wellused to execute computer software that assists in implementing thetechniques described herein.

Various alterations and modifications can be made to the techniques andarrangements described herein, as would be apparent to one skilled inthe relevant art.

1. A method for marking and annotating an electronic document, said method comprising: receiving annotations made by a user to at least one electronic document; storing a user profile based upon the received annotations made to the electronic document; and displaying annotations to a second electronic document based upon the stored user profile.
 2. The method as claimed in claim 1, further comprising determining user interface events that indicate said received annotations.
 3. The method as claimed in claim 1, further comprising determining text that relates to said received annotations.
 4. The method as claimed in claim 1, wherein said received annotations comprise highlighted text and annotation comments.
 5. The method as claimed in claim 1, wherein the displayed annotations comprise at least highlighted text.
 6. The method as claimed in claim 1, further comprising storing in a stored user profile highlighted text and annotation comments.
 7. A computer program for annotating an electronic document comprising computer software recorded on a computer-readable medium for performing a method comprising: receiving annotations made by a user to at least one electronic document; storing a user profile based upon the received annotations made to the electronic document; and displaying annotations to a second electronic document based upon the stored user profile.
 8. A computer system for annotating electronic documents comprising computer software recorded on a computer-readable medium said computer system comprising: means for receiving annotations made by a user to at least one electronic document; means for storing a user profile based upon the received annotations made to the electronic document; and means for displaying annotations to a second electronic document based upon the stored user profile.
 9. The computer program as claimed in claim 7, wherein said method further comprises determining user interface events that indicate said received annotations.
 10. The computer program as claimed in claim 7, wherein said method further comprises determining text that relates to said received annotations.
 11. The computer program as claimed in claim 7, wherein in said method, said received annotations comprise highlighted text and annotation comments.
 12. The computer program as claimed in claim 7, wherein in said method, the displayed annotations comprise at least highlighted text.
 13. The computer program as claimed in claim 7, wherein said method further comprises storing in a stored user profile highlighted text and annotation comments.
 14. The computer system as claimed in claim 8, further comprising means for determining user interface events that indicate said received annotations.
 15. The computer system as claimed in claim 8, further comprising means for determining text that relates to said received annotations.
 16. The computer system as claimed in claim 8, further comprising means for storing in a stored user profile highlighted text and annotation comments. 